around Orion, the remote disturbance there.
One morning he crawled out of his pod, buck naked.
There was a man standing there, staring at him.
Malenfant yelped and clamped his hands over his testicles.
The man — no more than a boy, probably — was tall, more than two meters high. His skin was copper brown, covered by a pale golden hair so thick it was almost like fur, and his eyes were blue. He had muscles like an athlete’s. He was wearing some kind of breechcloth made of a coarse white material. He was carrying a sack. There was a belt around his waist, of some kind of leather. It contained a variety of tools, all of them stone, bone, or wood: round axes, cleavers, scrapers, a hammer stone.
His neck was thick, like a weightlifter’s. He had a long low skull, with some kind of bony crest behind. And he had bony eyebrows, a sloping forehead under that blond hair. He had a big projecting jaw — no chin — strong-looking teeth, a heavy browridge shielding his eyes, a flat apelike nose. He didn’t, Malenfant thought, look quite human. But he was beautiful for all that, his gaze on Malenfant direct and untroubled.
He grinned at Malenfant and emptied out the sack over the sand. It contained bananas, sweet potatoes, and eggs. “Eat food hungry eat food,” he said. His voice was high and indistinct, the consonants blurred.
Malenfant, stunned, just stood and stared.
His visitor folded up his sack, turned, and ran off over the sand, a blur of golden brown, leaving a trail of Man Friday footsteps on the beach.
Malenfant grunted. “First contact,” he said to himself. Curiouser and curiouser.
He went to the tree line to do his morning business, then came back to the food. It made a change from fruit and fish.
He settled down to waiting. Man Friday and his unseen compadres surely didn’t mean him any harm. Even so, he found it impossible not to stay close to his pod, glaring out at the tree line.
He wondered what he could use for weapons. Discreetly, he got together a heap of the bigger stones he could gather from the beach.
When his next visitors came, it was from the lake. He heard the voices first.
Six canoes, crowded with men and women, came shimmering around the point of the bay. Malenfant squinted to focus his new, improved eyes.
The crew looked to be of all races, from Aryan to Negro. Malenfant spotted a few beautiful, golden-haired creatures like his Man Friday. He saw what looked like the commander, standing up in one of the canoes. He was dressed in a bead-worked headdress adorned with long white cock’s feathers, and a snowy white and long-haired goatskin, with a crimson robe hanging from his shoulders. To Malenfant he was a vision out of the Stone Age. But he was hunched over, as if ill.
Empty-handed, Malenfant went down the beach to meet them.
The canoes scraped onto the shore, and the commander jumped out and walked barefoot through shallow water to the dry sand. He stumbled, Malenfant saw, on legs swollen to the thickness of tree trunks. His face was burned black, and patches of hair sprouted from his scalp like weeds. But his gaze was alert and searching.
He reached out. There was a stench of rotting skin, and it was all Malenfant could manage not to recoil in disgust. To Malenfant, it looked like an advanced case of radiation poisoning. Something, he thought, is going on here.
The commander opened his mouth to speak. His lips parted with a soft pop, and Malenfant saw how his mucous membranes were swollen up. He began talking to Malenfant in a language he couldn’t recognize. Swahili or Kiganda, maybe.
Malenfant held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
The commander looked startled. “Good God,” he said, “a European… I never expected to see another European!” His English was heavily accented.
“Not European. American.”
“You’re a deep traveler.”
“Deep?”
“Deep in time. Like me. I left Earth the first time in 2191. You?”
“Earlier,” said Malenfant.
“Listen, I’m a kind of ambassador from the Kabaka.”
“Kabaka?”
“The emperor. Among other duties, I meet travelers. Not that they come often.” He noticed Malenfant reacting to his condition. He smiled, his mouth a grisly gash that exposed black teeth. “Don’t worry about this. I fell out with the Kabaka for a while. Most people do. My name is Pierre de Bonneville. I used to be French. I went to Bellatrix with the Gaijin: Gamma Orionis, three hundred and sixty light-years away. A remarkable trip.”
“Why?”
De Bonneville laughed. “I was a writer. A poet, actually. My country believed in sending artists to the stars: eyes and ears to bring home the truth, the inner truth, you see, of what is out there. I rode one of the last Arianes, from Kourou. Vast, noisy affair! But when I got home everyone had left, or died. There was nowhere to publish what I observed, no one to listen to my accounts.”
“I know the feeling. My name’s Malenfant.”
De Bonneville peered at him. He didn’t seem to recognize the name, and that suited Malenfant.
The golden-haired crewmen poked curiously around the charred husk of Malenfant’s reentry pod.
De Bonneville grinned. “You’re admiring my golden-haired crewmen. The Uprights. Kintu’s children, I call them.”
“Kintu?”
“But then, we are all children of Kintu now. What do you want here, Malenfant?”
Travelers and emperors, history and politics. Malenfant felt his new blood pump in his veins. He’d been among aliens too long. Now human affairs, with all their rich complexity, were embracing him again.
He grinned. “Take me to your leader,” he said.
Chapter 25
Pierre de Bonneville, with his crew of humans and golden-haired hominids, spent a night on the beach where Malenfant had fallen from orbit. By firelight, the human crew ate dried fish and sweet potatoes. The Uprights served the humans, who didn’t acknowledge or thank them in any way.
De Bonneville started drinking a frothy beer he called
When they were done with their chores the Uprights settled down away from the others. They built their own crude fire and cooked something that sizzled and popped with fat; to Malenfant it smelled like pork.
The boy Malenfant had dubbed “Friday” turned out to be called Magassa.
De Bonneville told Malenfant how he had traveled here along the course of the Nile, from where Cairo used to be. Like Malenfant, he’d been drawn, on his return from the stars, to the nearest thing to a metropolis the old planet had to offer. The Nile journey sounded like quite a trip: In A.D. 3265, Africa was a savage place once more.
“Listen to me. The ruler here is called Mtesa. Mtesa is the Kabaka of Uganda, Usogo, Unyoro, and Karagwe — an empire three hundred kilometers in length and fifty in breadth, the biggest political unit in all this pagan world. Things have… reverted… here on Earth, Malenfant, while we weren’t looking. The people here have gone back to ways of life they enjoyed, or endured, centuries before your time or mine, before the Europeans expanded across the planet. You and I are true anachronisms. Do you understand?
“What happened to you, de Bonneville?”
The Frenchman grinned and deflected the question. “Let me tell you how this country is. We’re like the first European explorers, coming here to darkest Africa, in the nineteenth century. And the Kabaka is a tough gentleman. When the traveler first enters this country, his path seems to be strewn with flowers. Gifts follow one another rapidly, pages and courtiers kneel before him, and the least wish is immediately gratified. So long as the stranger is a novelty, and his capacities or worth have not yet been sounded, it is like a holiday here. But there comes a time when he must make return. Do you follow me?”
Malenfant thought about it. De Bonneville’s speech was more florid than Malenfant was used to. But then, he’d been born maybe two hundred years later than Malenfant; a lot could change in that time. Mostly, though, he thought de Bonneville had gotten a little too immersed in the local politics — who cared about this Kabaka? — not to mention becoming as bitter as hell.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
De Bonneville seemed frustrated. “Ultimately you must pay back the Kabaka for his hospitality. If you have weapons with you, you must give; if you have rings, or good clothes, you must give. And if you do not give liberally, there will be found other means to rid you of your superfluities. Your companions will desert, attracted by the rewards of Mtesa. And one day, you will find yourself utterly bereft of your entire stock — and you will be stranded here, a thousand kilometers from the nearest independent community.”
“And that’s what happened to you.”
“When I stopped amusing him, the Kabaka dragged me before his court. And I… displeased him further. And, with a kiss from the katekiro — Mtesa’s lieutenant — I was sentenced to a month in the Engine of Kimera.”
“An engine?”
“It is a yellow-cake mine. I was put in with the lowest of the low, Malenfant. The sentence left me reduced, as you see. When I was released, Mtesa — in the manner of the half-civilized ruler he is — found me work in the court. I am a bookkeeper.
“Here’s something to amuse you. From my memories of Inca culture I recognized the number recording system here, which is like the
“But you see the irony, Malenfant. We travelers return from the stars to this dismal posttechnological future — a world of illiterates — and yet I find myself a prisoner of an empire that lists the acts of every citizen as pure unadorned numbers. This may look like Eden to you; in fact it is a dread, soulless metropolis!”
The Uprights were laughing together. Malenfant could hear their voices, oddly monotonous, their jabbered speech.
